5 Million Gmail Accounts were potentially hacked, was yours one of them?

There are 5 million people with a potentially hacked Gmail account. This means that if you do banking, send personal email or use your Gmail account to simply sign into premium services, you are at a major security risk. A massive account leak was recently seen with 5 million accounts with full email addresses and passwords being posted all over the Internet.

A Few Key Notes

This leak has many security experts stating their opinion on what transpired. The consensus is that the accounts listed were not hacked through Gmail itself. Instead, the accounts seem to come from:

Phishing attempts

Login information from other services that were breached

Many people, myself included, noticed that the passwords for many accounts are very old. That is, that the list seems to have many accounts with highly outdated passwords, which means that either the accounts were hacked a long time ago, or the owner likely used the same email and password on another site that was breached.

Verifying Your Account Was Listed

Your account may be one of the many listed on this list. A hacked Gmail account can easily be verified online. You can do the following to see if your account was hacked:

This will tell you if your account is on the list of hacked Gmail accounts.

An alternative site to try is isleaked.com. The site will scour its internal database with all of the hacked Gmail accounts. If your account is hacked, the site will list the first 2 characters of your password.

We should note that this site also includes hacked email accounts from various other providers, so the number of hacked accounts on the site will be in excess of 5 million.

Precautions to Take

If your account was compromised, you will want to take action immediately. The list is now available for the world to see, so if someone hasn’t accessed your account, they certainly will in the future.

Take the following precautions immediately:

Change Your Account Password

Changing your password can be done by following these steps:

Log into your Gmail account.

Click your profile picture.

Click account.

Click security.

Click change password.

You will want to pick a highly secure password with a mix of upper and lowercase letters, numbers and symbols. The longer the password is, the easier it will be to ensure that your account is secure.

Change All Service Passwords

If you used your same email and password combination on other sites, such as Amazon or iTunes or even your bank, you will want to change those passwords immediately. Many of the major websites, such as Amazon, have already scanned the list of hacked accounts and sent out notices to matching account holders to change their passwords.

Setup 2-Step Verification

Google has enabled 2-Step verification methods to ensure your account is always secure. This will include a regular password plus a security code sent by phone, text or through an app that must be input.

You can setup this verification security measure by doing the following:

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